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Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by DonHopkins on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @05:42AM (#29402524)
>I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`

You should post a link!

Every once in a while when I'm using a common unix command, I find myself randomly re-encountering the frame of mind that I was in, the world outlook I had, and the sense of amazement I experienced when I first learned it as a kid. A sudden and explicable feeling awe at the breathtaking pervasive power of "cat" or "ls" or "echo" and how they fit together, and the very idea of a shell with commands and files and directories that you could name, look at, change, and move around. Remembering the excitement of discovering and fitting a new important puzzle piece into the growing model of what I was learning.

Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by tptacek on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @01:05PM (#29407009)
For me, it was like, I know how to write a DOS batch file, and here's Unix, you can do some of the same things.

I was smarter as an 18 year old than I am now, though! That's a thing my IRC friends from the time constantly talk about today; the people we were when we were shouting each other out in 1990s Phrack issues seem a lot sharper than we are now. We used to hang out and build "protected mode program loaders" for fun. You know, operating systems.

Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by eashman on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @11:01PM (#29412431)
I was in the BBS scene in Baltimore in the mid-to-late 80s and totally relate. I think about some of the things I used to pull off on an Apple //e and then a 286 PC along with school and a job and wonder how I had time to do it.

Youthful energy? Or maybe the limitations of the tech made us work cleverly and thus made us prouder of the result.